RED SPRINGS — Glenn Patterson Jr. remembers the phone calls while away at college or elsewhere from his father, Glenn Patterson Sr., after Red Springs suffered heartbreaking loss after heartbreaking loss to Fairmont over the course of the last decade.
“It was stressful because he would call and say, ‘Man, I don’t know what to do.’ We had the teams with Tavion (Atkinson), Monte’ (Wilkerson) and all those guys was really good,” Patterson Jr. recalled of the talks with the head coach. “He’d be like, ‘I know we are more talented than them. It’s just we can’t get over the hump when we face them. We can play a whole three quarters and a half and in crunch time when the game was close, we would never pull out and get the victory.’ I was sitting there thinking about it tonight when the game got close in the last four minutes, I was like, ‘What’s about to happen?’”
Patterson Jr., now an assistant for Patterson Sr. at Red Springs, saw the beginning of the 10-year drought start during his senior season, after defeating Fairmont three times as a junior, and coached the end of the streak Saturday.
“As soon as I seen there was like 2 seconds left and Jordan (Ferguson) was at the line, I felt like a weight off my shoulders,” Patterson Jr. said. “It’s a great feeling. I’m just mad I didn’t get to celebrate with them because people was talking to me on the floor.”
The younger Patterson said the longer the streak got, the bigger the mental block seemed to be for the Red Devils.
“I really think that we’ve had teams that were just as talented, but it’s just that name on the jersey and from losing so much to them, it’s like your big brother,” he said. “You play your big brother so much as a kid and he’s always beating you, even when you’re grown, you still got that little phobia thinking that’s your big brother and he’s going to beat my tail.”
But now that beating Fairmont is fathomable to the Red Devils, he said getting more wins in the future shouldn’t be foreign.
“Even with our JV team after we won, we came in jumping around and celebrating things like that and I told them, ‘Now we are getting to the point where we are used to beating them. If we play with them when they are on varsity, it’s nothing new,’” Patterson Jr. said.
“I’m glad we got that out the way and now every time we play them now, it’s nothing like ‘we’re cursed.’ It felt like we were cursed.”
Since returning home before the start of last season after serving as an assistant at St. Pauls, Patterson Jr. has already helped accomplish one mission he set out for with Red Springs, and now this week brings another hurdle he looks to clear in a game that could carry a lot of weight in the Three Rivers Conference championship race.
“Right now, my next mission, I told my former players from St. Pauls two years ago that I wasn’t sure If I’m the curse because when I was at St. Pauls I went winless against Red Springs, now I’ve came to Red Springs and I’m winless against St. Pauls. I don’t know if it’s me,” he said with a laugh.
